“Production First, Living Second”

Abstract

This chapter examines the production of Chinese urban housing in the Maoist era and how it reinvented “the primitive rural dwelling” as a model for the new socialist way of living. Under Mao’s radical vision of “continued revolution,” the state rejected the comfortable private home as a manifestation of bourgeois ideology and the work units (as the state’s representatives) sponsored building the earliest “welfare” housing projects as spaces of rural-style collective work and living. Minimum existence mass housing research started under the Soviet influences but such urban-based design practices managed to weaken Maoism and its antiurban policies. Assessing this history, the chapter contends that the primacy of the work-unit system in the production of housing in the Maoist era deprived those who didn’t have access to work units from accessing welfare housing; the disparities between different work units also caused social inequities. In the post-Mao era, the Chinese urban housing boom presented a paradox: state policies that engendered unequal access to housing prevented the emergence of the working class and, instead, helped create a privileged middle class.